11 February 2016

Is Putin Trying to Topple Merkel?

EU Observer:If Russian leader Vladimir Putin was trying to use refugees to topple German chancellor Angela Merkel, then Aleppo was a step too far, Norbert Roettgen, the head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, has told EUobserver.

Merkel’s decision to welcome the huge numbers of people coming from Syria to Germany has drained her popularity over the past year.

She'll have to fight for re-election at the latest in September 2017.

When German pollster Insa-Consulere asked people last week if she should quit now, 40% said 'yes'.

'A year ago nobody would have dared asked questions like we did,' Hermann Binkert, the Insa-Consulere director, told EUobserver on Monday.

'But in the meantime, her approval ratings have dropped, mostly because of her position on refugees … Right now, there’s no discussion of an early election in Germany. But we can’t say how the situation will develop.'

The situation escalated last weekend when Syrian regime forces, backed by Russian air power, reached Aleppo in northern Syria, prompting tens of thousands of people to flee toward Europe.

It had already escalated on New Year’s Eve, when migrant men carried out sex assaults against German women in Cologne.

Pro-Kremlin media tried to make things worse by spreading a fake story that migrants also raped a 13-year old girl...

Search Reaganite Republican blog:

Korean DMZ, 1983

1980 campaign poster

Reagan Presidential Library:

1984 Reagan landslide

London, 1983

Nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan CVN-76

Quoth the Gipper...

"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid"

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us... Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

"We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent"

"Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to manage conflict by peaceful means"

"Of the four wars of my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong"

"If the Soviet Union ever let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state... because everybody would join the other party"

"How do you tell a communist? He reads Lenin and Marx. And how do you tell an anti-communist? Someone who understands Lenin and Marx."

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction; it's not something we pass along in our bloodstream. It must be fought-for, protected, and passed-along for them to do the same"

"Entrepreneurs and small businesses are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States"

"If you can't make them see the light, let them feel the heat"

"They say the world has become too complex for simple answers... they are wrong"

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours"

"Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement..."